Succulents and More™

Echinopsis ‘Flying Saucer’ is the first one to kick off this year’s cactus bloom season. As always, it made a spectacular entrance. There’s nothing modest or reserved about it. It’s as splashy as it gets. Since daytime temperatures have been on the cool side all week, the flowers have lasted much longer than usual. As I’m writing this, we’re on day 4, and the flowers are just now starting to fade; I expect them to be completely spent by tomorrow. Four days is a new record for me. On a hot summer day, the flowers sometimes don’t even last until evening. Day 1, March 31 I was hoping the flowers would open up before Loree danger garden Bohl went back to Portland, and they did: Day 2, April 1 On day 2, the flowers were a lighter pink than on day 1. This is the typical color for ‘Flying Saucer’. Day 3, April 2 On day 3, the flowers were a darker pink again. The petals were beginning to look a bit tired. Day 4, April 3 The petals looked much rougher now, but the flowers were still open. I ...

Portland garden writer Loree Bohl, the mastermind behind the danger garden blog and author of the Timber Press book Fearless Gardening , is an old friend. Loree had been wanting to visit for some time, and finally the stars were aligned just right. We spent three jam-packed days visiting gardens in the East Bay, both public and private, meeting old friends and making new ones. It was an exhilarating weekend – exhausting, yes, but in the best way when you’re tired, yet completely content. I’ll have individual posts over the next month. Here’s a teaser to whet your appetite. Ruth Bancroft Garden, Walnut Creek The first garden Loree and I visited was the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. I had just been there , but for Loree it had been six years. Tracy’s garden, Livermore Tracy chronicles the evolution of her garden on her blog tzgarden . Both Loree and I knew her garden from photos, but seeing it in person offered a completely new perspective. Suffice it to say that the three of us...

I’m always on the lookout for small groundcovers suitable for planting along the edge of the sidewalk. In January, I found myself at Morningsun Herb Farm , a fantastic small nursery about 25 minutes from here. I was thrilled to find a new line of delospermas called Jewel of Desert . I’d tried several delospermas before, including the spectacular Wheels of Wonder line, but they didn’t last longer than a season or two. I still don’t know why, but I’ve heard that the Wheels of Wonder delospermas are short-lived and/or need cold winters to keep going. The Jewel of Desert line was developed by the same breeder as Wheels of Wonder, Koichiro Nishikawa. His story is as interesting as his plants: He started breeding delospermas in Japan in 1996, but he was frustrated by the short growing season. In 2006, he moved to Ecuador with his family where the mild climate makes it possible to grow delospermas all year. Now his plants are available all over the world. In the US, they are distributed by C...

For the second year in a row, we have countless white-flowering California poppies along the edge of the sidewalk bed. The original inspiration came from the Walnut Creek garden of landscaper designer Cricket Riley who had a sea of Eschscholzia californica ‘Buttermilk’ in her front yard when I visited two years ago. ‘White Linen’ California poppies in our sidewalk bed Last fall, just like the fall before, I sowed thousands of seeds of a cultivar called ‘White Linen’. (I couldn’t find ‘Buttermilk’, but ‘White Linen’ is close enough.) I’d bought a package of 5000 seeds and gave about half to my friend Kyle. I don’t know how many seeds germinated, but there are plenty of poppies now. I wouldn’t want any more, because they do swallow up everything in their path.  I love the richness these poppies bring to the garden and plan to do the same next year. I could collect seeds off this year’s crop, but I don’t like the look of hundreds (thousands?) of bloomed out poppies so I’ll remove the...